In the age of online retail giants and impersonal transactions, OfferUp provides a breath of fresh air.

OfferUp is the largest mobile marketplace for local buyers and sellers in the United States, with more than 1 in 5 adults using the platform. The Company’s goal is to be the platform of choice for local commerce by connecting buyers and sellers through an interface that makes selling an item as easy as snapping a picture from a mobile device. In addition to their mobile marketplace, OfferUp allows users to post and fill jobs—and more—with a big emphasis on neighbor-to-neighbor connections.

Shom Yadav, Principal Product Manager at OfferUp, offers some perspective: “Our mission is to be the largest, simplest, and most trustworthy local marketplace in America.”

Through Statsig, OfferUp has the ability to achieve better connections—neighbor to neighbor—and improve the product offering and overall performance of the mobile marketplace.

“When I wear my OfferUp shirts in public, people always stop and ask me about our company. They love sharing their stories about buying and selling on our app,” says Arthur Klisz, a Senior Product Manager.

This raises the question: How did OfferUp become so successful?

Mobile-first technology

“We’re proud of the fact that OfferUp is a mobile-first company in every sense” Shom points out. “Yes, there’s a web platform, but a majority of our traffic comes from our mobile app.”

He continues, “Mobile devices are the ‘main channel’ for most people and the primary way they interact with apps and services—whether that’s ordering food, buying clothes, or doing general shopping. In our case, it’s connecting local buyers and sellers.”

On OfferUp being a mobile-first element, Arthur adds: “It’s really apparent in the simplicity of being able to post something, in terms of streamlining the process of uploading an item for sale. Users are able to post items—viewable by thousands of people in their area—all from their mobile phones.”

When compared to other marketplaces, OfferUp excels in the simple yet powerful interface and experience it provides its users.

“We’re a marketplace, but that doesn’t mean we have to look at other marketplaces to find inspiration. You can also look at subscription products, iPhone products and screens, app store products, etc., and evaluate how they feel and operate,” explains Shom.

Experimentation before Statsig

OfferUp has come a long way since its founding in 2011.

Four short years after its founding, in 2015 it was profiled by Forbes and named their fourth hottest startup due to its explosive growth and upward trajectory. Furthermore, OfferUp has been in the top 50 most downloaded mobile apps (and top 10 shopping apps) in the App Store and Google Play Store, and was even named first among the top seven emerging startups in Seattle.

“Experimentation has always been part of the OfferUp DNA,” Arthur advises, as OfferUp has been using experimentation platforms since its inception:

“Prior to Statsig, we were running experiments, but not at the rate and velocity we are today. We used another platform which carried some complexities that required us to conduct analysis outside the platform.”

Laura Spencer, Technical Program Manager at OfferUp, paints a vivid picture of experimentation before Statsig. “To restart experiments, we had to recreate them. We had to get results from multiple sources, and some of those sources had flaws. Furthermore, the results weren’t easy to share and review with everyone.”

“Statsig also helped us accelerate our testing with its simple onboarding,” adds Shom. “I’d like to point out the intuitiveness of the Statsig dashboard, setting up experiments, rules, metrics, variants, and how easy and straightforward it all is.”

Arthur shares more information about how Statsig accelerates experimentation. “In addition to the increased velocity, we also have a lot more visibility and detail in terms of our experiments and the number of metrics we have. Statsig gives great breakdowns into information and lets you drill down into metrics and see how they have trended over time.”

Regarding some of his favorite features, he jokes, “There’s the ability to compare users before an experiment and see how the sample might be biased—and even test for that! Making a decision on an experiment is really easy now: We have all our metrics in Statsig and we test all our experiments towards those metrics.”

Laura adds more context around the adoption of Statsig. “[Statsig Support] has been extremely responsive and supportive for all qualitative things like culture change as well as setting up the tool itself. Statsig has been the best experience I’ve had with any vendor.”

In terms of timeline, she indicates how quick and easy it was to get the entire company up and running. “We knew upon seeing Statsig’s user interface that it was something a lot of teams could use. Our setup was relatively short: We did a POC for a month or two and then ramped folks over the next two months. Four months in and everyone was done onboarding.”

“[Statsig Support] has been extremely responsive and supportive for all qualitative things like culture change as well as setting up the tool itself. Statsig has been the best experience I’ve had with any vendor.”

Laura Spencer

Technical Program Manager

Life now

With Statsig up and running, and all teams onboarded, OfferUp is hitting its stride.

“From my experience, Statsig has been very responsive in walking us through use cases, exploring different methods of experimenting, helping us solve our problems, and ultimately helping us hit our goals,” says Arthur. “Statsig has been awesome.”

In terms of using Statsig for success, Laura explains, “Part of our core mission as a marketplace is to connect folks in the local community. To that end, engagement is a key metric, and we measure it in all of our experiments. Statsig has helped us look at our experimentation through that perspective as well.”

Shom describes a recent presentation he gave that highlights how quickly OfferUp has been able to learn by leveraging Statsig:

“Our selling page is like a dashboard where people can engage with buyers, items, and so on. For this project, we were making changes to the selling page in order to upsell promoted items,” he outlines. “At the same time, another team was looking to see if having search and filter capabilities on that page would help even more. Since we were both targeting the same user persona, in a non-Statsig world we would’ve had to run test sequentially.”

He illustrates the upside of using Statsig: “We were able to run a mutually exclusive test by setting up a layer and having both experiences under one layer. By doing it this way, we were able to get results for both at the same time and easily slashed 2-3 weeks from our development cycle.”

About OfferUp Inc.

OfferUp is the largest mobile marketplace for local buyers and sellers in the U.S. We are changing the way people buy and sell in their communities by providing a uniquely simple and trusted experience on our iOS and Android apps.

Our goal is to be the platform of choice for local commerce by connecting buyers and sellers through an interface that makes selling an item as easy as snapping a picture from a mobile device. OfferUp was founded in 2011 and has grown to serve local markets across the U.S., with more than 1 in 5 adults using OfferUp in 2022.